ThomasPowers

Top seems to be less safe as convection after you shut the forge down can heat the parts a LOT. Also top burners have the possibility to recycle exhaust fumes as hot gasses travel up after leaving the opening---recycling exhaust increases CO production a lot. Most of the forges I have seen have had the burners on the side.

When you live out in the boonies and do esoteric research ILL is a massive help! I thank Ben Franklin *often* for the public library system and Andrew Carnegie the steel baron too!

Note the ILL: it stands for "Inter Library Loan". It's a process where you can check out books from *other* libraries in the system often over 100 and including big city and university libraries. Here in Rural New Mexico the local library can get me a copy of a book that a 4 year standing order at Amazon and regular searches at ABEbooks.com has not been able to find for me. So I would talk to the folks at the library about ILL---makes it a whole lot easier and cheaper as you can preview books to see if you want to buy them. Remember you're paying for the library might as well get you're money's worth!

I think the terms actually date back to gas engines with carburetors where rich means you were putting *more* fuel into it and you could smell unburnt fuel coming out the exhaust. Lean meant you were putting less fuel into it. I think you should study a bit more basic forging before starting bladesmithing; it will make bladesmithing much less frustrating if you have the basics down before having to deal with the fussy bits of bladesmithing. Have you got a copy of "The Complete Bladesmith" yet? You should be able to ILL it at your local public library. (Of course once you see what's in it you will probably want your own copy...)

Can't tell from what you posted. Is it a low grade chinese made vise or a top of a line german made vise? It's like "I just paid $5000 for a car, it has 4 doors, did I get a good deal or not?" We'd need to know the Make, Model, Condition to answer the question.

So many variables! You can be a skilled smith and a lousy worker You can be a skilled smith but not able to do designs You can be a skilled smith but not able to do sales You can be a skilled smith but not able to run a business USW... I know several smiths who have married someone with their missing talents and so have gone from barely scraping along to doing well.

In certain cultures people tend to be *VERY* *FORCEFUL* in their views and sharing them. If you work with them you do it THEIR WAY! Any other way is *WRONG*. You learn that this is their way and either learn to embrace it; ignore it or stay away from them. Arguing hardly ever works. I still remember how shocked my wife was when a German colleague of mine actually admitted that perhaps she was right when they were discussing something at a dinner party. My wife figures that 6 years of living in America had mellowed him out amazingly compared to when he first arrived. I am a believer that there are few 100% *anythings* and when people make such claims it annoys me; but it doesn't necessarily make them bad people---just inflexible ones. When I teach I provide a good selection of hammers and tell my students to find the ones(s) that work best for them and I also tell them that over time it may change as they gain skills and muscle. I do try to warn them about things that tend to cause problems in the long term but it doesn't get my knickers in a twist if they prefer a different hammer to what I do.

Sometimes A36 will get brittle and so ornamental areas of small cross section may break off, or harden too much to drill holes or file... David E. PM to you

Lean means *more* scaling; rich means *less*. Lean means more decarburization; rich means less (in general). Unless you are doing blades a balanced to slightly lean is the better especially wrt CO production. If you are doing blades it depends a lot on your skills. less experienced bladesmiths tend to do more heats and leave their stock in the forge more and so have more issues with scaling and decarburization. Actually for one ornamental piece I did, I tuned my gasser way lean to get a massive scale layer that I then broke off when cold to leave a pebbled surface for a dragon head door knocker's skin.

Did it get bent in use or in heat treat? If in use you can probably straighten it cold with less likelihood of damage If in heat treat---well you're making a guess as to alloy and heat treat process---good luck.

Well there are clamps and there are clamps---I have some that weight 30 to 50 pounds apiece and would ecpect them to damage the cast iron if you were not careful with them. I believe they were designed to hold structural steel in place as it's positioned.

Hmm "50# anvils" sound a lot like the Harbor Freight cast iron ASO's that are not worth a dollar a pound much less 4! I once used the broken knuckle off a RR car coupler---had a flat side and a curved side weighted about 80# and was free and was a GREAT anvil compared to an ASO! Somewhere on the net there is a video about a smith in Asia forging beautiful kukri's using the head of a sledgehammer as his anvil. It is the skills more than the tooling and you get the skills by PRACTICE! So far better to start *now* with improvised tooling than to weight till you get a "perfect set up".

BLF if you have a soft hammer and hard tool ends you can mar your hammer face which then needs to be dressed all the time. If you have a hard hammer and soft tool ends this is not a problem

Pay no attention to Rusty; weapons and tools can be beautiful spiritual things. In fact the Christian Bible has *two* places where it says to forge your Ag tools into weapons and only *1* that says to forge your weapons into Ag tools...(had a great pastor point that out to me once when I was getting started in smithing)

Do you really need a slack tub? At most I have a 5 gallon bucket of water to cool tong handles and punches in and can pour it out at the end of the day on my favorite tree (the one that shades the smithy on the west) and bring a new one out when needed. Since I like to do knives and other high C tools I do NOT like to have open water anywhere near the forge as hot metal has a destructive genius about finding it and self destructing. When I finish forging something I let it normalize on the smithy floor or on the dirt driveway or hanging from a hook. The "traditional" slack tub came about when everyone was generally using extremely low carbon real wrought iron or true 1018 mild steel and cooling in water was just a faster way of finishing the job. With A-36 I strongly suggest to NOT water cool!

And I'll go exactly the opposite---may you get to use it so much and so hard that you need to replace it in a year or two!

Note that "warm enough to wear gloves to load it" is probably several hundred degrees below "warm enough to mess up the temper". You should be able to boil water on the face of your anvil and not mess up the temper of it! Now as mentioned it starts showing the tempering colours I would cool it down fast; but in 30+ years of hobby forging I have NEVER even got up to boiling water on it. As most of us don't use strikers and work heavy stock by hand on an anvil I don't think this will be a concern. (Personally when I had a job working 2.5" stock it just had to wait until I visited a smith with a whopping big powerhammer---Chambersburg FTW!) Also as mentioned in the winter the problem is usually the opposite with the anvil needing a preheat to help extend working times of your stock. I generally heat a slab of 1/2" plate as a face warmer. A friend uses an old electric iron set on high and placed on the face. The fellow I was apprenticed to used to hang paint buckets of burning kindling on the horn and heel of his 400# anvil, I had a 93# anvil I would store inside and bring out when I was ready to forge, etc.

Coal forges don't tend to put out a lot of heat into the general environment---I point out to people who think my feet must be toasty working at a forge in the winter that important parts of my anatomy are much closer to the hot spot and are not damaged in the summer so why would they think my feet would be warm in the winter? What you worry about is hot metal---a cut off end can travel 30+'; stock flipping out of your tongs, etc. If your insulation is completely covered by corrugated sheetmetal I see no problems. I just leave big openings in my roof as we got less than 6" of precipitation this year *total*. Knowing WHERE you are at might lead to suggestions suitable for *YOUR* *LOCATION* If you are in a wet area you might see if you could go out a wall for your forge flue. Woodstove flues are much more picky as they deal with much hotter gasses and doing it to code will be a good idea!

I used to heat my 1 soft firebrick forge with a plain old plumber's propane torch. Note that the open area of that forge was about 3/4"x2"x4" for a total of 6 cubic inches. How big a space are you trying to heat?

Knowing how much something regularly goes for is the first step in looking to buy one! I've seen a lot of "buy it on sale at HF and try to sell it for more than the normal price on CL". At the fleamarket they know that I will not be paying more than retail for an item; but I will pay cash for what I buy and they know that if the price is right I will buy it! (How I end up with a bucket of ballpeens) When people tell me "it's antique" or "it's a collectable" I usually apologize telling them I was hunting for stuff to use...and I often would prefer not to own a mint antique tool as I plan to use them and often use them hard and I am quite willing for tool collectors to pay top dollar for those ones. Many the time has been when I won't buy something from one dealer at the fleamarket but will walk back past him with the very same stuff in my hands that I bought at what I consider fair price from someone else. (This particular dealer of tools once told me that the prices marked on the tools were NOT the prices he was selling them for---he wanted more!)

I believe the price still depends on the local market. The value of a car to me is much higher than I have ever paid for one. The value of a pint of blood to a person may be nearly everything they possess yet I still have given away more than 10 gallons of the stuff. If the value to a person is less than the price; then don't buy it! Just like the cost of a new post vise may be $700---this does not mean the value of a used one is $500 when you can still buy them for half that fairly easily!

Depends a lot on your set up, size and shape of your firepot, type of blower quality of fuel, ... Far better to attend a meeting or two of a local smithing group and get some hands on training! If you are near central NM, SWABA will be having their December meeting Jan 14th in the Albuquerque area. (Delayed by the snowstorm in Dec...) And our conference in February in Las Cruces NM!

As I've posted time and time again people have been using square block anvils for about 2000 years compared to 200 for the London Pattern. Take a look at a japanese katana being made in the traditional way on a square block anvil---National Geographic's "Living Treasures of Japan" includes a swordsmithing section.

Why, my mother can still surprise me at 55! (especially when she's in cahoots with my wife...)

Ahh the tailgating forum is the classifieds section here. Not a lot of folks sell tooling as a smith can make their own and so the mark up is not as high as one would like. I'd talk it over with your friend as to what he should look out for. I have heard of literally tons of anvil tooling getting scrapped over the years as the people don't recognize it as such.